Among the rich and famous who have started out their careers as Apprentices or Graduate Engineers are:

John Caudwell

Caudwell's first job was as an engineering apprentice at the Michelin Tyre Company in Stoke in 1970. He'd quit school the year before after a term of A-Levels with a burning desire to get out, on, up and rich. While waiting for his Michelin apprenticeship to start, he swept pottery floors, worked at a steel factory and as a nightclub bouncer. Eventually he became a successful car dealer but his path to serious money came through an early move into the fledgling mobile phone industry. Today he is the biggest independent player in the European mobile phone industry. Sales at his Caudwell Group leapt 33 per cent to £1.4 billion and profits rose slightly to £22m in 2001 but if much of Caudwell's £4m salary was included in the bottom line, the profit figure rises to £25m. There have been reports that Caudwell is looking to sell some of the business to Vodafone for a reported £400m. The whole operation should easily be worth perhaps £800m even in these very difficult times. His Staffordshire mansion and other property assets should easily take Caudwell to £840m.

Jim McColl

'I just haven't had time to have the curry yet,' says McColl of the £17,000 curry for 12 that he bid for and won at a recent charity auction. It's easy to see why. Now one of Scotland's top industrialists, he is building Glasgow-based Clyde Blowers business after having a 'very good year' in 2002. Perhaps the high point was the sale in October of CleanCut, an environmentally friendly oil services group specialising in the disposal of drilling waste. Spun out of one of Clyde Blowers' businesses in early 2001, CleanCut was acquired by an American oil services group in a complex deal worth up to £220m. McColl should get £100m from the deal with an initial cash payment and staged payments along the way depending on performance. McColl is something of a rarity today - an entrepreneur who actually served an engineering apprenticeship in one of Glasgow's leading industrial groups. Later in 1992, as an accountant turned company trouble-shooter, he paid £1m to acquire a 30% stake in a small quoted engineering business, Clyde Blowers, which cleans boilers etc. In 1998, as the stock market value fell, McColl took the company private, backed by venture capitalists. His stake rose to 70% in 2001 when he bought out the venture capital backers. The remaining elements of Clyde Blowers are now worth perhaps £200m. McColl is busy investing his newfound wealth in property and has a dozen properties around Europe. With his return on the CleanCut investment and his stake in what remains, we value McColl at £305m.

Jack Tordoff

Jack Tordoff started working for his father's garage business as an apprentice mechanic. After army service, he bought out his late father's two partners in the Bradford-based operation. That was in the late 1950s, and since then Tordoff has built the renamed JCT600 (named after his initials and the Mercedes car he bought in 1960 - a Mercedes 600) into one of the top luxury car dealers in Britain. The company, owned entirely by Tordoff, made around £8m profit in 2002 on nearly £300m sales. It is aiming for £9m in 2003. It is easily worth £80m and Tordoff's other assets take him to £85m.

Peter Dawson

Now running his DawsonGroup truck rental business out of the public spotlight, Dawson will be pleased with progress. In 2001, the Milton-Keynes-based operation made £15m profit on £70m sales. Cautiously we value the company on its £77.3m net asset figure. Dawson joined what was his father's haulage group in 1956, after serving an engineering apprenticeship, and turned it into one of the largest truck rental businesses in Europe. He floated the business on the stock market in 1988, but took it private twelve years late, increasingly fed up with City indifference to smaller quoted companies such as Dawsongroup. We add another £5m for past dividends and other assets to the Dawson family.

Stewart Milne

Stewart Milne has always been a football enthusiast and the game held much more interest for him than his lessons at the primary school in the Aberdeenshire village of Tough where he was brought up, and then at Alford Academy nearby. He couldn't leave school quickly enough. With thoughts of becoming an engineer, he managed to secure a job with an Aberdeen company. He realised it wasn't for him and became an apprentice electrician with another city firm. After serving his time he and a friend set up in business prepared to do anything from repairing kettles to rewiring, but gradually they came to concentrate on bathroom conversions which were big business in the granite city, not least because of the oil boom. From being a one-man builder, Milne has built the Stewart Milne Group into a major construction group in the North of Scotland. The company had an excellent year to June 2002 producing a record £8.5m profits on sales of £150m. We value the company at around £75m on these figures reflecting the better performance. Milne and his family have 95% worth £71m. He is also a director of Aberdeen Football Club, the struggling Scottish team. In all the Milne family is worth perhaps £75m with past salaries and other assets.

Rodger Dudding

The son of a naval officer, Rodger Dudding took a craft apprenticeship in naval engineering over the five years from 1954 to 1959 at Chatham 's naval dockyard. He regards it as invaluable experience, 'keeping one on the straight and narrow and instilling discipline,' he contends. After his naval career was cut short by injury, Dudding went into business before launching Lonsto (International) which makes and installs ticket and queue management systems used by banks and supermarkets. That business is still thriving and at least six million people a day pass through a Lonsto queuing system. But Dudding is also the king of lugs in Britain - or lock up garages. He has over 10,000 of them and is aiming for 20,000. The Lugs came about by accident in 1975 when a friend suggested Dudding should buy a block of lock-ups in south London. He realised that the garage business was fragmented and not regarded as a serious business. Single-handedly he changed all that. Today, he is also busy with small-scale developments of garages sites, turning them into badly needed housing. In all his businesses have net assets of over £70m and we value Dudding on that figure.

John Guest

After starting work as an apprentice toolmaker at 14, Guest went on to found his own business in 1961. John Guest International is one of the world's biggest makers of plastic pipefittings. Based at West Drayton, near Heathrow Airport the family-owned operation is chaired by Guest while his three sons are also directors. The business is a world leader in plastic fittings for the plumbing and car industries. In 2001, it made £5m profit on £58.7m sales. Around 60% of the production is exported and the company spends about 10% of its sales figure on capital investment. Guest and his family own all the shares in the £40m business. We add another £3m for salaries to the Guest family.

Ken Shaw

Ken Shaw left school at 16 having done badly in his O-levels. He decided on a career in engineering and went on to take an apprenticeship with GKN. For eleven years he worked in a variety of jobs studying at night school until he was 28, taking a job as works manager in a water gauge factory. He rose to be MD and later took over a taps and shower company. In 1985 he led a management buyout of the combined business, A&J Gummers, and in February 1999 the business was sold for £27.5m, netting Shaw over £20m for his stake.

Hilary Cropper

Working at the old GEC, Hilary Cropper took an engineering apprenticeship, and later joined computer services group, FI, in 1985. She became chief executive in 1987 and led the flotation of the business and led the flotation of the Hertfordshire-based operation in 1996. Now renamed Xansa, it has been hit by the fall in high tech shares. Cropper, now non-executive chair of the group, retains a £3m stake, while share sales since the float add around £14m.

Billy Connolly

The Big Yin started work as a 16-year-old apprentice at the Govan shipyard in Glasgow. He started his showbiz career as a folk singer but at the age of 33 was propelled to national stardom on Michael Parkinson's show. Today, with his Highland estate (a £500,000 buy in 1998) his Home Counties mansion, and the proceeds from tours, videos and TV appearances, Connolly is worth £15m at least. We can see around £1.5m of net assets in the 2001 accounts of his Sleepy Dumpling (Music) business.

Charan Gill

Charan Gill arrived in Glasgow from the Punjab at the age of nine not speaking a word of English. At 15 he left school to take up an apprenticeship with shipbuilder, Yarrow, and qualified as a turner fitter. He worked there for nine years and made extra money at night by waiting in a friend's restaurant. With his cousin, he eventually took over the restaurant and today he runs Harlequin Leisure, Europe's largest independent chain of Indian restaurants with 17 outlets. IN 2001, Harlequin made around £360,000 profit on £2.9m turnover, which has since risen to around £10m. It is worth at least £10m. Other assets such as Harlequin Properties and Harlequin Homes take Gill to perhaps £13m.

Leonid Brezhnev

Leader of the former Soviet Union, metallurgical engineer.

Thomas Edison

Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The most famous of his inventions was an incandescent light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the kinetoscope, a small box for viewing moving films. He also improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. Edison was quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

Alfred Hitchcock

British-born American director and producer of many brilliantly contrived films, most of them psychological thrillers including "Psycho", "The Birds", "Rear Window", and "North by Northwest." He was born in London and trained there as an engineer at Saint Ignatius College.

Henry Bessemer

English inventor and engineer who invented the first process for mass-producing steel inexpensively - essential to the development of skyscrapers.

Rowan Atkinson

A British comedian, best known for his starring roles in the television series "Blackadder" and "Mr. Bean" and several films including Four Weddings And A Funeral. Atkinson attended first Manchester then Oxford University on an electrical engineering degree.

Philip Condit

CEO, The Boeing Company, mechanical/aeronautical engineering.

Henry Ford

Held many patents on automotive mechanisms but is best remembered for helping devise the factory assembly approach to production that revolutionized the auto industry by greatly reducing the time required to assemble a car. Born in Wayne County, Mich., Ford showed an early interest in mechanics, constructing his first steam engine at the age of 15.

Steve Wozniak

Cofounded Apple Computer, Inc. in 1976 with the Apple I computer. Wozniak's Apple II personal computer - introduced in 1977 and featuring a central processing unit (CPU), keyboard, floppy disk drive, and a $1,300 price tag - helped launch the PC industry. In 1980, just a little more than four years after being founded, Apple went public. Wozniak left Apple in 1981 and went back to Berkeley and finished his degree in electrical engineering/computer science.

George Stephenson

Was famous for Building the First Public Railway Line to Use Steam Locomotives. Civil engineer and mechanical engineer

Nicolas Parsons

After distinguishing himself at St Paul's School both in Latin, Greek and Rugby. He found himself beginning an apprenticeship for a firm that made pumps and turbines where his first pay packet for a 48 hour week was 49p!